lefroggy01

Guilt for 20th Century Mass Deaths

Lenin as Peacemaker

Marxist Guilt?

The Black Book as Unreliable Source

Junk Politics About China

The Meaning of Responsibility – A Wider Project?

Was World War Two Unavoidable?

Wider Reading

Lenin as Peacemaker

World War One was the biggest mass killing in Europe since the Thirty Years War.  Much bigger than the combined Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the biggest European event between the two.  But by no stretch of the imagination can that World War be blamed on socialists.  All of the governments that joined the war were favourable to capitalism.  All of them had parliaments that had the option to prevent the war in the long-running crisis over Serbian terrorists with probable Serbian-government sponsorship killing the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary.  All except the Ottoman Empire, which was attacked after wishing strongly to avoid the war.  Attacked because tsarist Russia wanted Constantinople, see Pat Walsh’s Ireland’s Great War on Turkey (https://www.atholbooks-sales.org/searches/author_search.php).  And it fitted the wish of part of the British elite to break Imperial Germany (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/problems-magazine-older-issues/how-the-british-establishment-planned-world-war-one/).  

While some socialists were persuaded to support the war and even to join coalition governments, socialists were also the bulk of the people who openly protested against the war.  And if you exclude pacifists, some of them also socialist, then an overwhelming majority of those serious about ending the war were socialists. 

Russian revolutionary socialist – not yet calling themselves Communists – called for peace in the months between the incoherent February Revolution and the relatively peaceful take-over in October.  A parliament elected by a rich minority had insisted on continuing the war, but was losing as badly as the Tsarist government had repeatedly lost.  

Lenin demanded a peace without annexations and without indemnities.  The victors at Versailles were later to impose plenty of both.  They denied the freedom promised to Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and did not consistently apply self-determination even within Europe.  Woodrow Wilson had used the idea as cover for an intervention that ensured that Britain and France would pay for the loans and supplies they had got from the USA.  Even his famous Fourteen Points broke the principle twice (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/woodrow-wilsons-deceptive-14-points/).  

So how do anti-socialists blame socialism or communism?  The usual dodge is to measure ‘deaths by dictator’.  This feeds the liberal prejudice that Bad Persons must cause it all, even though both multi-party parliamentary regimes and ruling monarchs seem to me to have started just as many wars.  

Franco kept Spain out of World War Two. The same was true for Salazar’s Portugal and Ataturk’s Turkish Republic.  Likewise the ruling monarchy of Thailand.  The self-appointed first Shah of Iran of the Pahlavi dynasty was overthrown by the British because he wanted to stay neutral.  More recently, Gaddafi’s militancy did not involve Libya fighting anyone: nor did it have internal wars until he was overthrown.  The initial Leninist takeover in Afghanistan was peaceful, and the USA put enormous effort and spent gigantic funds on an opposition that could never keep internal peace.  That first modern Afghan War generated people destined to become formidable foes of the peace the West had hoped to impose.

Marxist Guilt?

In the 29 calendar years that Mao led China, the economy grew faster than in the Indian Republic.  Faster than either the USA or Britain.  And the always-high Chinese death rate fell much faster than for other poor countries.

If Mao was over-bold with the Great Leap Forward, would a less bold leader have achieved the same degree of success with no serious setbacks?  Easy to imagine, hard to achieve.  Mao had a record of being bold and being justified by events, which is why he gained so much authority.  And why China still honours him.

For the Soviet Union, we’re told by the European Parliament that Stalin caused World War Two.  Now I’d freely agree that Stalin took steps to reshape the growing crisis to be the least bad alternative for Soviet survival.  But some sort of Second World War was likely, regardless.  Books as different as H G Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come, Olaf Stapleton’s Last and First Men and Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies expect a new war within a few decades.  And while Waugh is vague about the cause of the war, the other two mention Poland.  DeepSeek found five more for me: it was a widespread expectation.

The Trotskyist movement has been amazingly successful as a cultural influence in the West.  Entirely useless as a Leninist movement: in its century of independent existence it has only ever done damage to other leftists, and was never seen as a serious threat by any capitalist government (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Trotskyism-a-Century-of-Failures).  But so much has it dominated thinking about the Soviet Union that a popular right-wing graphic showing drops of blood for deaths caused by dictators has not one drop for either Lenin or Trotsky, though they were the first people to suggest that Marxists should overthrow the capitalist and parliamentary government that Russia’s February Revolution had created.

The graphic is anonymous, but shows Japanese leader Tojo as guilty of five million deaths.  Most authorities would say that the invasion killed at least 14 million Chinese, and millions more elsewhere in Asia.  He was also not a dictator, merely a leader given the top job after the war started.

What’s worse is a mere 17 million for Hitler.  Official estimates are 60 to 75 million for World War Two, including 6 million Jews and 5 million others intentionally exterminated under Hitler’s authority.  So to me it is obviously pro-Fascist as well as anti-Communist, though most people fail to notice that.

The Black Book as Unreliable Source

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is the translation of a French work edited by Stephane Courtois.  Published by Harvard University Press 1999, and it is the nearest thing to a reputable standard source on alleged Communist guilt.  

The Wikipedia, which is anti-Communist when it is not neutral, says 

“The work was praised by a broad range of popular-press publications and historians, while academic press and specialist reviews were more critical or mixed for some historical inaccuracies.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

Stephane Courtois was a Maoist in 1968, and has become an obsessive anti-Communist.  Not the only young radical to turn to bitter hatred when their own vision of the Glorious Future fails to come off.

The work is trash.  Every anti-Communist story becomes an undeniable truth.  Some of its claims are demonstrably false.  And it is soft on Nazism.

Taking the standard line that Stalin etc. were personally responsible for every death among those they ruled, it claims 85 to 100 million deaths caused by Communism.  Yet by contrast:

 “Nazism, which at an estimated 25 million turns out to be distinctly less murderous than Communism.”  (The Black Book, pages x-x1)

World War Two killed 70 to 85 million.  Most Westerners would blame most or all on Hitler.  Myself, I estimated that 25 to 35 million can be blamed on Imperial Japan (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/deaths-caused-by-hitler/.)  Also Croats, anti-Soviet Ukrainians and people in the Baltic Republics killed Jews without direct Nazi involvement, with Croats also killing Serbs and Ukrainians killing Polish Christians.  Some war deaths might be assigned to other allies, including starvation in Leningrad that happened because Finns blocked access from the north.  But a figure as low as 25 million for Hitler is simply ridiculous.

To make sense of the book’s figures, they must be saying that Stalin was responsible for the estimated 26 million Soviet citizens killed in the war, but Hitler was not.  And really, how was Stalin supposed to deal with Hitler?  Give him a flower?  (Someone might want to do a YouTube production making use of these ideas.)

Also someone in a position to embarrass him should ask Stephane Courtois if he accepts the standard figures of 6 million Jews and 5 million others intentionally killed by Hitler, often at the expense of the Nazi war effort.

Another weirdness is claiming that Lenin changed the Bolshevik name from Social Democrat to Communist from an admiration for Sir Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella.  Both devout Catholics, and their anti-capitalist utopias had some gains for women but kept them definitely inferior and subordinate.  Nor did they share the Bolshevik belief in Free Love, at least for heterosexuals.  The Bolsheviks correctly placed among a mixed bag of people who had some of the same ideas before modern socialism emerged.  Commonly called Utopian Socialists.

The simplest search would point to the Communist Manifesto.  Marx and Engels created this for a small short-lived Communist League.  Thought more of a broad front from 1864 with the First International.  And by the 1870s, they were one of several influences within an electorally-successful German socialism.  Then the government blundered when trying to suppress them: 

“… the treason trial of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (SDAP) leaders. During the proceedings, prosecutors read the text of the Manifesto into the court record; this meant that the pamphlet could legally be published in Germany.”  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto#Rise,_1872%E2%80%931917). 

But for many years, ‘Communist’ was just the name of a popular summary of Marxist ideas. The initial German publication was as part of a report of the Treason Trial, in which followers of Marx were jailed for two years after voting as elected representatives against the annexation of Alsace–Lorraine. It boosted the movement, but at the time Socialist or Social-Democrat were the standard names. 

In 1914, Lenin was among a minority who were appalled by the way that various socialist parties had supported their own national government in the drift towards World War One. Some of the objectors were pacifist. Lenin revived the name Communist to make it clear that revolution must be preferred to letting ordinary people wage a hideous war for rival versions of capitalist imperialism.

‘Don’t Mention the War’ might be Courtois’s catch-phrase.  Only it is World War One, which was still killing citizens of the short-lived multi-national Russian Republic.  Lenin overthrew a war-mongering government that still looked to the British and French promise that Russia would get Constantinople and the Dardanelles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinople_Agreement).  An older loose promise had encouraged Russia to forbid Serbia’s government to be close-questioned about the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.  But with the war going badly, it was secretly formalised in the same time-period as the disastrous British Empire attempt to make good on it with the Gallipoli Landings.

As it happens, I have a family connection on my mother’s side.  A great-uncle who had gone to Australia volunteered for World War One and died at Gallipoli. My sister Merryn, who is anti-war and an excellent poet, gave the man a fine memorial:

“Far from Devon, from Australia;
“why he went – a mystery –
“he took his skeleton, his rifle,
“leaving no posterity.” 

Britons suffered less than most, but we suffered.  And benefited indirectly from the Soviet alternative being there, so the ruling class up until Thatcher were scared and moderate.  Kept free Higher Education, low unemployment, and did not dare touch the National Health Service.

Another detail – Marx and Engels in a new preface for the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto wondered if Russia could directly become a communist society.  Bolsheviks at the time of the non-socialist February 1917 revolution had decided that Tsarist Russia was now committed to capitalism.  That the next stage would be French-style politics that Marxists mostly call Bourgeois Democracy.  Stalin as the senior Bolshevik present in Petrograd was running them on that basis.  Then Lenin returned and demanded something much more radical.  Stalin was one of many who came round to this view.

In a wider context: Trotsky had taken up the idea that Marxists should grab power for themselves.  But he had been hostile to Lenin’s party over several years, and had far too few organised followers to make it good on his own.  The idea had anyway been invented first by Rosa Luxemburg and by a Russian of Jewish origins called Parvus.

Rosa Luxemburg was an idealist, murdered by right-wingers in 1919.  Most of her followers and colleagues became Communists.  Most notable was Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet security services.

Parvus later became an agent for Imperial Germany.  I suppose that if he’d kept it secret and if Lenin or Stalin had then shot him as a traitor, he would have been elevated to the ranks of Innocent Martyrs.  In fact everyone rejected him, with Switzerland weirdly deporting him as a Bolshevik agent.  He died in 1924 of natural causes, or maybe of disappointment. 

Ignored in the West apart from an out-of-print book called The Merchant of Revolution, Parvus would be fascinating for a film or documentary, or another book.  Solzhenitsyn includes him in his accounts of Lenin in his Red Wheel, but his work is too twisted to be trusted.  Solzhenitsyn opens with the nonsense claim that Lenin got his faction called ‘Majority’ when it was a minority.  It is well documented in works by Lenin and others that he based this on being a majority of the Iskra faction of Social-Democracy within the Tsarist Empire.  Other factions had less in common than Bolshevik, Menshevik and other factions who’d once been together on the newspaper Iskra.  One of these was the Bundists, who wanted a Jewish state dominated by Jewish values within the territory of the Tsarist Empire.  A Bundist autonomous state could have happened within what is now West Ukraine, where Jews were numerous.  Tragically, most of that once-flourishing Jewish population either fled or were killed by the people the current Kiev regime treats as heroes.

Junk Politics About China

Another demonstrable absurdity from the Black Book is on page 280.  It dates the Kuomintang-Communist alliance to 1925-26, and has Chiang Kai-shek already leading it.  It was only in 1927 that Chiang gained dominance over rivals, in part by dropping the more radical aspects of Kuomintang policies.  Reforms that had been defined by Sun Yat-sen, undisputed leader until his unfortunate death in 1925.  

Authors who lay down the law about Chinese history seem unaware of Sun’s gigantic role in the matter.  And probably don’t know that Sun’s loyal widow consistently supported the Communists.  Her role in using Edgar Snow to publicise Mao in Red Star Over China was probably far bigger than standard histories recognise: my own research found unexpected clues (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/china-nurturing-red-stars/). 

The book also repeated Chiang’s barefaced lie that the Communists wanted to take over.  As orthodox Marxists, the Chinese Communists expected what Leninists call a Bourgeois Revolution, given that Chinese capitalism was far weaker than in Russia 1917.  They expected to see much more capitalism, but including land reform that would remove a parasitic landlord class.  And ending the effective ownership of chunks of many Chinese cities by foreign powers. 

Chiang failed to do this, letting landlordism stay intact.  Letting Shanghai remain dominated by a French Concession and an International Concession run by the British Empire and the USA.  Allowed similar things in other Chinese cities.  And all this stayed in place until the USA got it formally abolished during World War Two, when anyway the Japanese had taken over and interned all the US and British men.

The Kuomintang still allowed foreign warships to sail up the Yangtze.  It was left to the Communists to establish the real sovereignty that had been lost in the Opium War, with stands like the famous Amethyst Incident.

On page 471, the book correctly identifies the importance of Peng Pai in making the Chinese peasantry a revolutionary force.  Though it calls him P’eng P’ai, his name in the older Western system for Chinese names that China replaced formally in 1979, and which almost everyone now uses.  But it then calls Mao “a previously marginal Communist cadre”.  Mao had been a major radical leader in Hunan in 1920-21, when others with Comintern advice were organising a Chinese Communist Party.  The senior of two delegates from Hunan to the formal founding of the party, thought there is some confusion about who and whether it was 12 or 13 or some other number.  He remained very important in the alliance with the Kuomintang, and then in started again with a few followers after Chiang Kai-shek’s betrayal of the abortive 1927 revolution.  

Mao was one of two founding member who remained important after 1927.  The other was Zhang Guotao, who like Parvus was one of the traitors who might have been another Innocent Martyr had their guilt not be so blatant.  At one time a serious rival to Mao and with his own Red Army, he then defected to the Kuomintang and supported Chiang Kai-shek.  But was unwanted and lived in Canada till 1979, converting to Christianity shortly before he died (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Guotao). 

Then there’s Tibet.  People all over the world will nag China over Tibet but say nothing at all about Kashmir: this includes Joanna Lumley who was born there as a child of the last days of British rule.  The Black Book takes a sillier-than-usual line on this:

“The 4 million to 6 million Tibetan nationals had made it quite clear that they were not happy being part of the Chinese state.”  (Page 542.)

There were never as many as four million ethnic Tibetans until recent years, when they and other minorities like Uighurs have multiplied greatly within People’s China.  Nor did any except a few of the elite have even a limited understanding of modern politics.

What’s now the Tibet Autonomous Region was called Outer Tibet under British Empire influence, just as Mongolia was for a time Outer Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, with the ‘Outer’ part becoming dominated by Leninists and achieving full recognition as sovereign by China and the wider world.  The British Empire never did this for ‘Outer Tibet’, though the 13th Dalai Lama made a claim.  But in 1940, Chiang Kai-shek’s government with US support stepped in and got its preferred candidates recognised as Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama.  They did not allow the Golden Urn test, which had lots for several candidates in the hope of a supernatural selection.  They backed those Tibetans who said that their government-friendly candidate was obviously the same man who had tried to quit China in his previous incarnation.

The Wikipedia, mostly reliable on basic facts, chooses to ignore what happened in 1940 in its history of Tibet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tibet#De_facto_independence_(1912%E2%80%931951).  Nor does it mention Lhasa’s failed attempt to get newly-independent India to accept them as a sovereign state in 1947.

In 1951, when Beijing reasserted control, Outer Tibet had at most one million inhabitants.  Another 2 to 3 million lived as minorities in various parts of Inner Tibet.  All ruled by warlords before the Communist came: either Han or Chinese Muslims (Hui).

At least the book doesn’t have Chinese People’s Army generals flying into Lhasa before the place even had an airport, as happens in the film Seven Years in Tibet.  The one starring Heinrich Harrer, Hollywood’s favourite SS man (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/42-china/tibet/falsehoods-in-seven-years-in-tibet/). 

Harrer in his 1952 book had described people called Khampas as bandits who threatened and exploited honest Tibetans in the region loosely ruled by Lhasa.  An issue evaded by those later hailing them as Freedom Fighters.  It was Khampas who’d left provinces that Beijing was reforming that started the 1959 revolt and the Dalai Lama’s exile.  Before that, Mao had respected Lhasa’s autonomy enough to leave it to the Dalai Lama to end Tibet’s ancient serfdom and slavery, which this ‘holy man’ never did.  The new government in Lhasa freed them, and Tibetan exiles seem to be entirely from the displaced ruling class.

Harrer also mentions with apparent disdain the tolerance for homosexuality among Buddhist monks.  Buddhism is mostly tolerant of homosexuality, but monks and nuns are always required to be celibate.  Also vegetarian, and the Dalai Lama confuses his admirers by being as much a meat-eater as most of his kind.

The Meaning of Responsibility – A Wider Project?

This work is the first stage of a wider project.  I plan to say a lot more about the complex issues of guilt and responsibility.  For instance the Tory government could have made peace after the Fall of France.  Documents later made public suggest that Hitler would have demanded less than the most of the ministers were willing to give (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/how-hitler-might-have-had-a-victorious-peace/).  Churchill certainly did more than anyone else to prevent it – does that make Churchill guilty of subsequent deaths?  It is definite that the mass deportation of German Jews only began after the British Empire refused to concede defeat: it had been much smaller and less regular than that.

Professional historians should have sorted this out years ago, but far too many defend the myth of a virtuous British Empire and a noble USA.  Most on the left are much keener on bad-mouthing Stalin than recording the much more damaging sins of the centre-right when fascism was advancing.  I and others do what we can – see very notably the work of Brendan Clifford and especially his Union Jackery (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/unionjackery.88pp.pdf).  I hoped and still hope that the Global South will eventually take this up to undermine the West’s excessive claims.

I also had a wider idea – why not an entire encyclopedia?   A Global North-South Encyclopaedia?  I’ve blogged about why it is needed, given the bias and limits of the current very-useful Wikipedia (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/A-Global-North-South-Encyclopaedia).  

Saying more will need at least one more article.  I’m working on it.

Was World War Two Unavoidable?

Accepting that a Second World War was always possible, who was to blame for the actual war?

I’ll start with the East Asian end.  There were no possible excuses for the full-scale Imperial Japanese invasion of China that began in 1937.  Nor for their failure to offer terms that Chiang Kai-shek might have accepted, rather than attacking the USA in 1941.

China had alarmed Japan by a wide coalition under Chiang’s leadership that included the Communists and several warlord rivals.  But it would have been unlikely to risk trying to recover what Japan had taken already: it was just resisting fresh demands.  And that Chinese government did not actually declare a war until after Japan’s attack on the USA.  They had to keep US sympathy, with many in Congress favourable to Japan.

Roosevelt did intentionally put economic pressure on Japan.  He could not declare war without Congress.  Japan’s hard-liners were fools who repeatedly murdered other much smarter servants of Japanese Imperialism.

The Soviet Union meantime kept peace with Japan until almost the end – till after the Hiroshima bomb, in fact, though it had been agreed months earlier.  It suited both sides.  And Japan must have noted that the Soviet Union applied racial equality far more sincerely than other powers at the time.  Nazi awarding them the status of ‘the Aryans of the east’ was even less rational than their other racism: it did not rule out a future racist conquest if Germany had won.

Note also that calling it the Second World War only became general after the USA joined and merged the East Asian and European wars.  Early on it was sometimes called the European War, or just The War.  

The European end began with the German attack on Poland, which obliged Britain and France to join in.  But what gets overlooked is that they might have urged Poland to let Hitler have Danzig, which was strongly ethnic-German and nominally a Free City.  The promise could have been that there’d be a war only if he demanded more.

If people say that Hitler would have had a world war regardless, I’d answer that it might well have happened, but compromise would have been worth trying.  We did avoid the Cold War becoming World War Three, and I’m expecting the same for the Ukraine crisis.

Back then, I suppose that the views of the elite, the views of ‘Upper London’. shifted drastically in March 1939.  Hitler ignored the Munich Agreement and took the Czech half of Czechoslovakia as the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’.   For ‘Upper London’ it was unacceptable as a matter of power politics.  They also had the Spitfire aircraft and radar defences that had been only partly ready earlier.

I’d also say unconditionally that once the war began, Hitler repeatedly made choices that made the war much larger and more damaging.  And nothing obliged him to deport unrebellious Jewish populations.  Nor to start the mass pre-planned killing of Jews and others he saw as unfit to live. 

Mass killing was only confirmed at the Wannsee Conference on January 20th 1942.  It was always slowed by the Nazi wish to keep it secret.  Even though the Polish underground took great risks to confirm the killings, the Western governments delayed publicising it.  And many fighting against the Nazis also believed that the stories were as untrue as World War One stories of German atrocities in Belgium had been.

The military authorities in both Britain and the USA also rejected the idea of bombing the railways bringing Jews and others to the death camps.  It would have saved lives, but done little to speed the defeat of Germany.  Another matter of power politics deciding.

Wider Reading

Many more articles on-line, giving a new vision of socialism:

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